The Front Runner

down them, running free like two deer. We dashed through the dappled sunlight under the great trees. We were hyper-oxidated and deliriously happy. The act of running was all tied up in my mind with the feelings I had when he was near me.
    Miles off in the woods, there was a small, lonely, clear lake. We would always strip there and go swimming. I had seen hundreds of boys naked in the locker rooms at school. But when I saw this adored friend of mine naked, my feelings turned to sexual desire. In confusion and distress, trying to be casual, I always smothered this feeling. Chris apparently did the same.
    So we squandered the summer of '52 that way.
    At the end of our last run, as we were nearing the edge of the woods but still out of sight from our cabins, Chris suddenly stopped and said, "I want to say goodbye here."
    He put his arms around me. But panic equaled affection, so we did no more than embrace each other awkwardly with our panting sweaty bodies brushing together. He touched his lips to my cheek, near my mouth, and after a moment's shaky hesitation I did the same to him. We swore that we would write to each other, and that we'd see each other next summer.
    The next day his family closed up their cabin and returned to New Jersey. I ran alone in the woods that
    day. I would have cried bitterly, but my father had taught me that real men don't cry.
    I didn't have the courage or the verbal ability to put my feelings on paper, so I never wrote to Chris. He never wrote to me either. The next year we heard that the Shelbourne cottage had been sold to somebody else. I never saw Chris again.
    My senior year in high school, I went through two or three casual girlfriends, searching in vain for that feeling that Chris had stirred up in me. Part of the problem seemed to be that their intensity about sex did not match my own. That year, too, I won the mile run at the Penn Relays. My dad was tremendously proud, and kept those first newspaper clippings framed on the living-room wall till they yellowed.
    After graduation in 1953, I was a little torn. I wanted to go straight to college and run, but the Korean War was still on, and I was itching to go over there and collect a belt-full of gook scalps. So my parents let me enlist in the Marines. But I had scarcely finished boot training when the truce was signed.
    This was a big disappointment, but I thrilled at being a Marine anyway. They promoted me to lieutenant, put me on the Marine track team and let me compete as much as duty would permit. I trained hard, and my personal best in the mile was a 4:04.3, which was considered very good in those days—Roger Bannister had broken four minutes in 1954. I began to hope I could make the Olympic team in 1956.
    But when my four-year hitch ended early in 1956, my dad's business was in trouble. Instead of training, I had to help him out, and to take a job as copy-reader at a newspaper. Bitterly I sat in the noisy city room and proofread the results of the Olympic trials.
    That fall I went to Villanova on an athletic scholarship, majoring in journalism and minoring in phys ed. But I was still working nights and my training suffered. While I made the varsity track team, my running went nowhere near as well as in the Marines.
    To make things worse, in 1959, my senior year, I was dating a girl named Mary Ellen Bache. While looking for the Chris feeling, I managed to get her in trou-
    ble. Of course it was my duty to marry her, and I did. Neither of our families was happy with the event. It was a bad way to start a marriage.
    Out of college in 1960, the next Olympic year, I had to face it. With two family responsibilities weighing on me, there was no place in my life for amateur track competition.
    But I could stay close to the sport by choosing a profession connected with it. I still didn't have the graduate credits for teaching physical education, so it had to be newspaper work. I went to work for the Philadelphia Eagle as a trackwriter, and went to school nights. By getting up early every morning and running a few miles, I managed to stay in minimal shape.
    The work was exciting and paid pretty well. I could travel to all the big meets, which got me away from the uneasy situation with Mary Ellen. I could chum with the big-time runners, share vicariously in their griefs and glories. I was the classic sock-sniffer.
    Only now was I beginning to admit to myself how dangerously deep my feelings about all this went. In the Marines, the